Rambus Moving into Improving LED HDTVs

At the Lightfair International conference this week, Rambus is showing off technology acquired from Global Lighting Technologies last year, which Rambus is attempting to license to third-party display makers, including developers of HDTVs.

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Rambus, once known for its memory I/O technology, is branching out.

At the Lightfair International conference this week, the company is showing off technology acquired from Global Lighting Technologies last year, which Rambus is attempting to license to third-party display makers, including developers of HDTVs.

The technology is an improved light guide, used for edge-lit LCD TVs that use side-mounted LEDs to improve the brightness of the picture. The light guide routes light through the LED panel.

The Rambus MicroLens light guide focuses the light so that the diffusion is directed, not random, executives said. That will also improve the uniformity of light passing through the panel, said Kendra Deberti, a senior marketing manager at Rambus. The technology can also be used for back-lit LEDs.

Once strictly a memory technology developer, Rambus rose to fame in the late 1990s as the preferred memory vendor of choice for Intel's chipsets. For more than a decade, however, Rambus has been involved in litigation back in forth between itself and others in the memory industry; recently, company executives decided to shift more to a policy of technology diversification. In January, chip and display maker Samsung settled with Rambus for $900 million, taking a stake in the firm as well.

According to Tim Messegee, the vice president of marketing for Rambus, the light guide technology can reduce the number of LEDs used to a few high-brightness LEDs. In a 2-feet-by-2 feet panel, an average of 72 LEDs are used per side, he said. The Rambus technology can cut that to sixty per side, which Messegee said would reduce the overall bill of materials cost by 50 percent. Each LED typically requires one watt each, so there are power savings as well, he said.

That could be important for another reason: with the surge in LED demand, analyst are worried about running out of LEDs.

In total, the technology can save about $50 to $100 in costs. "And that's cost, so there are a lot of markups that you'll see get passed along to retail," Messegee said, which will be pulled out of the end price.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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